Teaching in the Post-COVID Period: The Questions of New Normal and Abnormal

COVID-19, legitimized online education in the higher education sector. Online teaching possibilities coupled with the freedom of designing courses through MOOC would open up altogether a new environment in higher education. In the MOOC era, teachers with the most student-enrolled courses will be the best teachers. This paper argues that the very idea of teaching will be dismantled in the post-COVID period. A genre of teachers, ‘Teaching Executives’ would be the result of such changes. They will engage in the marketing of their courses among the student consumers. The division of labor within teaching would emerge as a new idea to economize the ‘course production function’. The job that a traditional teacher performed would be dismantled into a content writer, presenter, and evaluator. The teaching profession will become similar to entrepreneurial jobs in the new normal. Teachers will design courses and market them among the student consumers. Survival of the entrepreneurial teacher poses thus a new puzzle: Are we going to face a new normal or an abnormal period in higher education? The word is the new normal and thus entails the dubious task of acquiescing the teachers to be recruited into a neo-liberal labor market.